readline bashing (was POSIX bashing)

[Marcus J. Ranum]

ed at mtxinu.COM (Ed Gould) writes:

>I know that there are a lot of things that legitimately need more
>than 64KB (even the worlds smallest fully-functional Unix kernel -
>the one at Bell Labs research - is larger), but most of the things
>that take more than that do so because they're bloated with excess
>goo, badly coded, or - most likely - both.

	One fellow sent me mail in response to my earlier posting that
was very thought-provoking. I can't recall exactly what his phrase was,
but the gist of it was:

We are running CISC software on our RISC machines.

	In fact, the analogy is quite interesting - I've never been a
"hardware guy" but didn't RISC computing evolve from studies that showed
effectively that only a certain core set of instructions were needed,
and that RISC architectures would be easier and cheaper to make, and
that they got the job done just as well?

	Does anyone have any pointers to papers on the original CISC Vs.
RISC comparisons and theory that a hardware illiterate can understand?
I'm kind of intrigued by all this - I'm sure some interesting metrics
could be generated for software - what portions of a large windowed
application's user interface are actually used? How much of GNU-emacs
is actually used, etc, etc, etc.

	The computer-customer community seems addicted to "features"
(without reasoning why - those 3d borders *are* c00l) but there might
be an interesting niche for software that has the parts that are used
and omits the glop. Of course it'd be a really problem getting a machine
with RCS (Reduced Complexity Software) to fairly benchmark against a
machine with CIS (Complexity Inflated Software).

mjr.
--
    The deadliest bullshit is odorless and transparent.
                   - William Gibson   1988